welcome

I COULD EAT A HORSE is a multi-artform participatory project exploring the diverse relationships that individuals and communities have with food and the food industry.

Since 2012 A Moment’s Peace have been asking people to dig deep into the how, why and where questions; from personal choices about consumption, to examining who is in control of our access to food.

We’ve been across Scotland carrying out interviews, running workshops, making films, hosting interactive events and eating some very good food along the way. We wanted to know what can our relationships with food and the food industry tell us about Scotland today, what kind of food culture do we want in the future and how do we get there?

This site has been created to offer you an insight into the project, to share our creations and discoveries, as well as to continue the debate with you. So, we invite to explore the site.

Enjoy!

the project

Food is a universal subject and something that we all interact with everyday. It differentiates between the poorest and wealthiest. It is tied into issues of health, climate change, economics, as well as land rights and global trade. Food has the power to dictate the potential of all human life.

It is for these reasons A Moment’s Peace made the decision to begin researching the human stories behind its significance and the complex meaning it has within our everyday lives.

The first stage of the project took place in 2012 with Artistic Director Catrin Evans and Associate Artist Maryam Hamidi interviewing people across Scotland whose lives, both personal and professional, were deeply intertwined with the production and consumption of food. They spoke to farmers, growers and local producers; they spoke to supermarket managers, cooks and marketers; they spoke to consumers as they were out and about buying their food. Talking About Food brings together extracts from these interviews for you to explore.

With hours and hours of interview material A Moment’s Peace began to see the complex recurring themes affecting people across the country in a myriad of ways. The deeper we delved into the topic the clearer it became that there was no single story to tell. Instead we wanted to create platforms for people to creatively respond to these themes, to ask questions of themselves, as well as their local and global communities. And so the second stage of the project was born.

I Could Eat A Horse: Films About Food

In the Autumn of 2013 A Moment’s Peace worked with 12 community groups from all across Scotland to create 12 unique short films that focused upon human narratives, but shed light upon, and ask questions of an industry that is increasingly globalised.

Our four creative teams worked for three months in Greater Glasgow, Edinburgh, The North East and Dumfries & Galloway, delivering over a hundred workshops with 146 participants ranging from ages 8 - 80. Each group as tasked with creating a film that reflected their own concerns and/or their experiences of their local community. The result being a collection of rich films, diverse in style and theme, taking on topics ranging from geographical isolation from food, to potential environmental impacts on food systems, the increased reliance upon food banks, multi-cultural diets, the mixed messages young people receive, the power of communal eating and alternative food producing models.

The final ongoing phase of this project is about sharing our work with wider society, with the hope of provoking further discussions about how food affects and connects us.

Our first event was at the Catstrand in New Galloway, before visiting the CCAin Glasgow, Summerhall in Edinburgh, and finally The Woodend Barn in Banchory. In each venue we invited the groups and local audiences to consider their own connections to food and the associated issues through film screenings, creative exploration and discussion.

The first time we brought all twelve films together at one event was at Nourish Scotland’s Annual Conference: Our Common Wealth of Food. In October 2014 Nourish Scotland hosted a 2 day event with 200 local and international delegates with the aim of taking us closer to an ethical food policy. This inspiring conference enabled us to offer up our films as part of the debate; reaching policy makers, producers, and retailers who are all working to create a fairer food system.

We continue to seek out opportunities to share our films, as well as the discoveries we have made throughout the project. If you are interested in screening any of the films, or have any forthcoming events you would like us to be involved in please contact info@amomentspeace.co.uk

talking about food

This space has been created to share extracts of the interviews carried out by A Moment’s Peace’s Artistic Director Catrin Evans and Associate Artist Maryam Hamidi in 2012. The people we spoke to and the experiences and insights they shared inspired us to develop the film project and continued to inform us throughout its delivery.

Scan through the sections below, hover over any section to read the extract.

BOILED EGGS WERE A GREAT TREAT...

My earliest food memory is sitting in the high chair being fed a soft-boiled egg by my father. It’s a very good memory. I was born just after the war and it was very hard to get eggs; so boiled eggs were a great treat. My father worked the boats and the American sailors at the docks used to sell bacon and eggs to people. It was something special; an egg out of an egg-cup, soft-boiled. Sometimes he would make switched egg, which was with hot milk. You drank it with sugar - like eggnog, but without the brandy! And then I think as I got older it was mashed up in a cup, and by older I mean a toddler sitting in my high-chair. I remember this tremendous excitement about having AN EGG!

THAT'S WHY THAT GIRL'S FAT...

I hate shopping. I just find it stressful. I just find it - for me as well - I always imagine... I hate going for a meal as well. I hate eating out. I always imagine - this is a bit weird - I always imagine that when people see me eating in a restaurant, whatever I’ve chosen, that they’ll look at my plate and go “that’s why that girl’s fat”. But it’s totally - it’s in my head! In the supermarket as well, people will be judging you. It’s a clinical and communal thing. No one makes eye-contact. It’s just, you’ve got control of your own basket and everyone’s just getting their own things. And somehow, what you put in your basket reveals so much of your life.

AN EXCESS OF FOOD GOING TO THE WRONG PLACES...

I think there is an excess of food going to the wrong places. I think that things like GM, which have allowed us to have a mass of food, are not being used in the right way. In that if we have the right technology we should be sending that food to places where there isn’t any food. Because it’s crazy that the countries which produce so much of the food that we eat aren’t...well, those are the people that are going hungry. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s that whole Irish famine thing. When they were producing all that food but they didn’t have any themselves. And so all they were eating were potatoes but they were producing all this other food that was being sent over to England and England continued to take the food even though they knew the Irish had nothing else to eat – like very ‘clever’ ethnic cleansing.

THEY WOULD HAVE TO SCRIMP ON THE FAMILY DINNERS...

My research took a family perspective. Really looking at how families negotiate with the marketplace: their attitude to brands and their attitude to credits; how they manage their budget; the shops they go to; how they planned their shopping strategies. During that research we talked about food and we talked about clothing. The one thing that came out – which I guess I was a bit surprised about initially – was that food was an area where they felt they had a bit of flexibility. I mean quite often, within marketing, the conventional theory is that you’ll sort out food and shelter – all that kind of thing – before we start worrying about the more social needs, which are to do with image and symbolism. But what I found was that food, for a lot of these families that I spoke to, was something that was consumed within the privacy of the home so it was something that no one else could see. In other words no-one else is going to judge you on what you were eating, in contrast to clothing (especially their children’s clothing). That was something that everybody could see so they felt that, quite often, that is where their priorities lay. It was about ensuring that their children were fitting in with everybody else, with peer groups and they would admit to spending forty pounds (or whatever) on a pair of Nikey trainers so that would mean that they would have to scrimp on the family dinners, for a week or two weeks or whatever. So – they just have beans and chips instead of meat and veg or, you know, a proper dinner. But that’s what they felt was necessary to do, based upon the way society judges upon appearances.

FEEDING AND CHECKING, THAT SORT OF THING...

Effectively my day starts by erm... well I tend to do an hour or two hours outside, first thing in the morning. So I’m out, basically going round the stock... checking stock... I will also then be feeding pigs, and cattle, and that sort of thing... so I’ll be...I’ll spend an hour or two hours going round all the stock in the morning to see if anything’s calved, any problems, anything escaped, anything looking sick, anything in the wrong place...erm, ...just seeing what needs doing...erm, so that’ll take me a couple of hours...like I said, this morning, we did that, and then erm, we brought all the cows and calves in to the handling pens this morning, erm, because there was a...a new calf born last week that needed to be tagged and castrated...so they came in this morning, so that was this morning’s jobs...and then, depending on...it really depends on what’s going on that day... I might then spend the rest of the day in the butchery...or...I might go back out and do more stock work, or fencing, or, there’s always work in the office as well...so I mean, and then, end of the day there’ll be another set of rounds to do, feeding and checking, that sort of thing...and then erm...it’s so dependent on, on the cycle you know the time of year. I mean, if, if it’s, we lamb in May, so in May time we’ll be around the sheep, 2 or 3 times a day, checking...if there’s orphaned lambs or sheep in difficulty then, you know...you, just do whatever needs doing... But basically we’re a stock farm, so you’re committed to going round the animals once or twice a day, every single day...seven days a week, three six five a year, yeah yeah.

THAT'S A BIT OF A TRAUMATIC DAY FOR ME...

Most of the time, the animals that we’re killing are out of fairly large groups, so you don’t really know them, you just don’t spend enough time with them. I mean when we kills pigs, probably the fewest we’ll send away is six. We might send away a dozen or fifteen, and they’ve probably come out of a group of fifty or sixty, so I mean, you don’t really know them as individuals. There might be one or two in there that you do know... there might be one you tagged as a youngster because you thought it might be suitable for breeding stock later, but generally there’s a big enough disconnect - in terms of a personal connection - that it’s not an issue for me. And most of our customers that buy from us, buy because I can give them the reassurance that our animals had a decent existence up until the point of death...erm...and the customers want that. Where it gets harder is when we’re into killing animals from smaller groups, like the cattle particularly. The cattle have a much longer life as well. Our cattle are killed quite old as well, most of them will be sort of approaching three years old before we kill them; so they’ve been around for a bit. I’ve only got 15 or 20 cows anyway, so I know every single animal that’s come and I’ll know when I send it away whose son or daughter it was that’s just about to be killed. That’s a bit of a traumatic day for me. I don’t like doing that, you know. I have to steel myself to do that. Logically it’s no different to anything else I kill, you know, the animal was alive and now it’s dead, but there is an emotional response and I find it tough some days. There are some weeks when I seem to do nothing but kill animals and that wasn’t why came into farming. But if you’re going to eat meat, you’re going to face it. If the day comes when I can’t look an animal in the face knowing it’s going to be killed, or that I’m personally going to kill it, I will need to get out of the business, because I can’t - I can’t pass that on to somebody else to do for me. If I can’t do it, that’s my ethical line... you know, I’ll become a vegetarian that day, if I can no longer look an animal in the face and kill it.

WHAT WE'RE FIGHTING AGAINST IS CONVENIENCE...

I think the biggest thing we struggle with is... no, what we’re fighting against is convenience. It takes an effort to shop in a different way and what Supermarkets offer is a way to shop with less effort. So it isn’t necessarily the fact that people prefer supermarket products, or that they wouldn’t buy from us if they could, it’s just the fact that they’d rather just go shopping once or twice a week. Not have to come out to our farm, not have to put in an order form, not have to be around when we deliver once a month. You know, they’ve got to go and buy bog roll anyway, so they’ll pick up a packet of bacon while they’re there, instead of coming to us and buying our bacon once a month. So it’s... that’s what we fight against.

IT'S NOT JUST SCOTTISH BEEF I'M COMPETING AGAINST...

I mean, it’s not just scottish beef I’m competing against...you know, I’m competing against Argentinian... or your USA beef, your New Zealand lamb... your Asian poultry and pork... you know... what should we do, make this pork a bit cheaper. ‘I know, let’s pay people less, in another part of the world to produce it for us’... I don’t know what happens when we run out of ‘cheap people’... but that’s, I don’t know how far off we are running out of cheap labour in the world... probably a few generations... but it might happen one day, I’ve often thought about that... what happens when we run out of a country of cheap labour to ship our low value products from.

WHO'S PAYING THE PRICE FOR THAT...

I have this theory that all food costs the same to produce... which sounds a bit, kind of, counterintuitive... but actually, I studied a certain amount of economics at university, environmental economics, and then I did some research work when, when I first graduated... and if you apply that thinking to food, basically, all food costs the same... it just depends who’s carrying the cost. So, it costs you a certain amount to produce a certain kilo of grain, or a certain kilo of, of meat protein or whatever it is... now in my system, I try and put as much of that cost as I can on to the end consumer, because at the end of the day it’s you that’s eating, it’s your, it’s your product. But if I was to compromise, I could put some of the cost onto the animal... so I could squeeze more animals into a shed than should really be there for the animals’ comfort, which would lower my costs, which – in turn – means I could lower your costs. Who’s paying the price for that? The animal’s paying the price.
I could choose to put fertility into my field to grow a bigger crop of grain, or a bigger crop of grass... so I lash on a bag of nitrogen, produced in a factory. Who’s paying the cost for that increased yield which means I can lower my cost to you, the consumer? There’s the cost of producing the nitrogen in the first place, which is atmospheric – quite a huge amount of fossil fuels. There’s global warming, all the rest of it… there’s going to be a lot of nitrogen run off, goes straight off the fields and into the water courses...so Scottish Water’s going to have to clean up the nitrates out of that water before you can drink it... it’s going to create an algae bloom in the estuary, which is going to suppress fish stocks, and all the rest of it... so yes, I produced your cheaper food, which may be easier for you to buy it, easier for you to enjoy it... but actually, the environment carried the cost in that instance. You know, I could work 7 days a week, as many hours as god sends,...so that I can produce more products, cheaper, but then I carry the costs for that... Do I have a family life or do I spend all my time working?
The best model, is to put the full cost on the end product... and then you can decide whether it’s worth it or not, you know... but I can’t do that if somebody else is substituting... is reducing their cost by putting it onto the animal... by instead of rearing pigs outside, stuff them all in a heated shed, cut their tails off, clip their teeth, pump them full of antibiotics, and make them grow much, much quicker; much, much bigger; for much less feed. You get a cheaper rasher of bacon...but the pigs have a pretty dank and miserable life...you know... But, as long as there are people doing that, then the consumer’s always going to have a choice about you know the price of food and so, ‘I can’t buy your food, it’s far too expensive, I’ll buy the cheaper food’. The fact is, the food isn’t any cheape We want it all to happen now, we want a vibrant food culture in this country, but it isn’t going to happen now, you know... because we have to step out of this cheap, normal way of doing it... Because it is not all about choice. But it is very easy to perceive it like that...and I don’t like that, you know... I’m just trying to produce good food... and I’m trying to make the food carry the cost not anything else...

INVISIBLE CONSUMPTION...

Clothing and kid’s toys, and trainers, and ipads are so on are visible. That’s what your son takes out to the playground. And we hear stories about mothers who are not skimping on the visible consumption, but they are on the invisible consumption. So they’re providing less nutritious food in order to be able to provide clothing and goods and so on, so their kids don’t look poor when they step outside the door. Really scary society that makes a mother feels that’s a rational choice for her.

THEY WILL FALL FOR THE TRICKS...

And er, but he was talking about the, you know again, the research which was done in psychology for marketing... And there are, millions and millions of pound spent every year on understanding our psychological... you know, our ways of buying, how do we buy[?]... and er, you know, we don’t stand a chance, you know, I mean we still have our neanderthal brains... You know, really, haven’t developed that much, and so we still tend to buy based on what we would have done if we were a neanderthal. [laughs]... And er... but they know all the tricks, you know to, to help us, to help to choose their products… I don’t know any of this stuff...but when you read about the budgets, and some of the sort of... the tests they do...er, before they do any marketing at all, then you just think ‘crumbs’ you know...erm...anybody is a bit distracted about you know, you know ‘what am I going to feed the kids tonight?’, you know...they will, they will fall for the tricks very quickly and easily. And, er, they won’t be thinking, ‘well what I really need to do is buy from a local producer, who’ll appoint local people with a decent wage...and er, with no chemicals going into the ground into, into our water supply...which is really fresh and full of nutrition for my children’...they’re just thinking ‘oh god, I’ve got to scrub the carrots, I haven’t got time, I’m going to buy this packet over here, you know, which is pre-scrubbed, and pre-chopped and possibly already pre-cooked as well, and bung it in the microwave’...but you know, the difference in nutrition, is…is…is vast, you know... but it’s not something that the food industry promotes. It’s not in their interests, er, to promote...the fact that real nutrition is important.

I HOPE THAT MIGHT CHANGE...

...we’ve got so far to go in this country...so far...but it’s... there’s no point in, kind of, getting too stressed about it...because it’s going to be a generation that changes before it’s going to come. Hopefully, the generation that’s growing up now, seeing these programmes, seeing food being talked about, seeing ingredients being talked about, more importantly than food... The more they realise that ingredients exist, not just packets, and boxes and things, they’re...perhaps, in a generation’s time, you know, they’ll start passing that on to their children as well, and, you know, it’ll get a bit better. This as opposed to the generation which probably I come from, where it was much more about convenience and price, and... that, somehow, it was better to have something come out of a factory, than out of your own kitchen...that whole idea...I hope that might change...I hope it might...

IT’S ALL ABOUT APPEARANCE...

So we went up to see his wee carrot shed [laughs], which was a multi-million pound thing, which was owned by one of the big supermarkets, so he was in partnership with them, but er...so we, we saw how the er, how the process was done. You know from when the carrots arrived, you know on the big, big truck erm...they were dumped on to this automated thing which washed them...and erm, and they come down this sort of erm, lots of conveyor belts and things, where they were, there was a bit of human intervention to look for the ones that didn’t fit the shape... So they had the pictures of the carrots which were good, with a big tick above them, and the ones which they wanted to avoid you know, with a big cross you know...[laughs] so, it’s all about appearance, you know,... and size as well, so size is very important.

AISLES AND AISLES AND AISLES...

When I was living in the Caribbean there was only one supermarket that was quite big, but nothing to touch on Tesco or your Asda, nothing at all...
And when I came here for a visit anytime, I would just be like...I just I... because you don’t need it...you just don’t need it...but we’re taught to need it... And I remember asking people in the aisle...I just needed stuff to do the laundry...and I said to this lady, ‘excuse me but...what, what do I choose?’... and people couldn’t understand because, I talked Scottish, I looked Scottish, I am Scottish, but I’d been out of the country for 20 years...in a tiny wee island, and all of a sudden you come back, and there’s all of this stuff...and I’m just thinking ‘this is, this is obscene’...and you didn’t know how to choose it. It’s all the same, completely the same...and the same with the food...you know you look at the aisles, and aisles and aisles, and then you look at the imbalance in the world...I mean you just think...‘this isn’t right’...I couldn’t get my head round it.

THE SUPERMARKET AS A PERSON…

The Supermarket as a person...
Er...you’ve got me there.
Erm... (laughs)
Quite sleekit
And chamelion like and er
quite clever...erm
I see a person with one of those wax moustaches, and a top hat, and a big cape, saying come over here...
Very aggressive, very dismissive of other opinions, probably a bit of a narcissist
They lure you in and you don’t realise that what you bought was not quite what you thought it was until you get home. Yes, somebody slightly dapper…
A conformist, not very tolerant or supportive of other opinions, probably a megalomaniac, in the sense that, I have to be the biggest, and the most important, the shiniest light on a dark night…
Tall, dark and handsome male...strong, all encompassing...you know could put your hand at anything, you know, almost like a jack of all trades… I come out with things I probably, I don’t necessarily need... my kids, my kids these days turn round and say ‘for goodness’ sake mum, I’m not coming in with you’... ’oh I’m just going in to get bread and all, i’m just going in to get bread and milk’...you know...‘see, they knew you couldn’t just come out with bread and milk’...
There’s something about them though. Where you sort of instantly feel like you’re
luxuriating... you just get seduced. And you end up going: Oh that’s the person I want to be, with them olives You overbuy. You just see things that you wouldn’t usually see. And you gorge in the world of plenty
It’s a real bonding thing. I don’t know why. We’re just… A lot of our time has been spent doing food shopping. It’s been kind of a, I don’t know what it is, it’s not really a guilty pleasure because I don’t think either of us feel guilty about it.
I used to work in the grocery - twenty or thirty odd years ago. Erm, there was one old lady in the area. Had a reputation for being as tight-fisted as… No matter how small the cut of the cheese, she always wanted it smaller. And er, she got on my nerves one day. She said ‘have you got anything smaller than that’. And so I said ‘well look, there’s more than that on a cream cracker [laughs]. That’s the kind of personal touch you no longer get. ...Wanting to be loved by everyone.

THEY’RE RATIONING THEMSELVES...

Other mothers talked about getting the cheap off-cuts - it’s a phrase I hadn’t heard before, the ‘whoopsies’. It must be sort of the seconds, the discounted lines on a Sunday. And they’re very tactical in using it...food is something that can be flexible in a budget as well. And so by trading down in food – people – well, that’s part of their management of their scarce resources. Er, but obviously in trading down in cost they’re taking a lot more of their time, which is a resource as well. So they’re (one of my partners uses the phrase), they’re ‘rationing themselves’ in order to spend all this time to budget and go and find the cheapest products. And so there are trade offs in every movement of the food prices, and people experiencing poverty will know exactly the price of everything; they’ll be the best budgeters. And it’s in food, particularly, where they feel there’s a bit of flexibility in their budget.

IT’S OFTEN MORE EXPENSIVE TO EAT CHEAPLY...

But it’s often more expensive to eat cheaply because you have to be able to store products if you’re buying in bulk. If you want to take advantage of 2 for 1 offers you have to have space in your fridge, you also have to have the cooking skills and the cooking facilities, you have to pay for gas to be able cook something... whereas just microwaving something for 2 mins probably uses less electricity than cooking something on a slow roast. For example, if you get a cheap cut of meat you have to have the oven on for a considerable period of time. There was something on Newsweek Scotland on Saturday morning talking about a scheme in the Gorbals and saying it was a voluntary organisation, where they go to the market early in the morning and buy a whole load of cheap products – vegetables and fruit and so on – and then take it around and sell it, very very cheaply to local community members. And they talked about how for elderly people on their own often they’d only need half a pumpkin for example, so they’d sell them half a pumpkin, and they wouldn’t have the waste of a whole pumpkin. So that would be a really good example of an organisation that’s coming in to deliver that need of providing small but frequent amounts.

CLASSIC MARKETING...

The way food is so branded, the brands of food consumption can be again a signifier of status, and class, and wealth and so on.
And there’s people transferring things… I can’t remember the example, I think it was the Cornflakes from the own brand to the Kellogg's box and so on just to hide it from the kids. And I guess the other thing is how the brand factor has permeated the children’s sense of, erm, what’s important and so on. We picked up research that a child by the age of three will handle a toy differently if they’ve seen it on TV to if they haven’t seen it on TV; it will be treated differently by the child if it’s been in advertisements and so on. And food’s one of the biggest examples of that because a lot of food, in an economic sense, you can’t differentiate between. Like one potato and another, one can of beans and another – because they’re fairly standardised products. And so, the differentiation comes through the branding and the packaging and so on. And that’s just classic marketing.

THEY TRICK YOU...

So I’ve taken up a vegan diet, a strict vegetarian diet. I’m not a full vegan, so I’ll still wear leather, I’ll still use certain products, but I’m trying to turn my whole way of thinking round to Veganism. It stems from my dislike of supermarkets and the way they tend to govern the whole food industry.
They dictate to people what is available for us to eat. Everything in supermarkets is processed food. Erm, so they trick you into thinking that they’re selling healthy food by putting the fruit and veg right in front of the doors where you walk in, so that you think, ‘oh look, that’s really pretty wholesome food’, but it’s probably brought in from the other side of the world, and it’s picked before it’s ripened properly, and it’s ripened on the journey, and it’s tasteless, and not really...not really that good for you...erm, and it’s to get you into the store so that they can trick you into buying lots more stuff.

IT’S AN ADDICTION...

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who are just greedy fat bastards, cause there are, and I’ve been that in my time, and sometimes I still am...But it’s, it’s, it’s an addiction that nobody ever feels any sympathy for.
You get a girl, erm, that very, very much...I mean I used to go to over-eaters anonymous – I sometimes still do – and what you get in there is, you get people like me who are over weight...and you also get bulimic, and anorexic people coming in. Because it’s a very similar mindset...it’s an eating disorder, a food-control thing. And a girl, or a guy who’s anorexic will be, well...it’s a cleansing thing, you know, it’ll be a purifying thing, a control thing, and a body dysmorphia as well.
Erm, and my over eating...I identify a lot with an anorexic person, which is unbelievable, because we’re both coming from the same place...in our relationship to food, you know...a fear of food, and a kind of distrust of it, and not quite knowing what to do, and every single person’s got a different opinion on how you should lose weight...or gain weight. And it’s got so bad – we’re bombarded with it; it’s so difficult to cope with, and to deal with.

EVERYBODY’S GOT AN OPINION…

Well, you get everybody... I mean... Well I’ll use an example. At work, you know, occasionally somebody will say something to me about it. And I’ll go, ‘aye, yeah, right’, ... you know, I don’t really want to talk about it because I’m bored of it a wee bit, you know. Somebody will say, ‘Oh I’ve been on this great diet, you should try it’, and I’ll go ‘Oh God’.
And then, you know... there’s pressure from my family to get a gastric band... Now...unless the gastric band was strapped around a bit of my brain... it wouldn’t work, because I would find a way, you know. So everybody’s got an opinion on what you should do, and the real... I mean, I think, the only solution is for you to come up with your own solution to it. And the best way I’ve found – I mean I’ve been on a journey in the past couple of years with it – has been through cognitive therapy, and talking about it, and trying to find out my reasons for over-eating. Er, I’ve got a really brilliant GP who totally understands... erm, who was with me when I was smoking, and drinking and all this kind of stuff. Erm, it’s just education of the people who have the eating disorder, but it’s also education of people, and how to respond to that, you know, and how to respond to somebody that’s struggling... rather than to call them a ‘fat bastard’, or laugh at them, or play tuba music behind them on the telly. Just to, to kind of, try and understand that it’s like alcoholism, or...erm, another addiction...because if you’re, if you’re a heroin addict, you’ll get full sympathy from the state; you’ll get a methadone programme paid for; erm, you’ll get understanding from a work place... you’ll get all this kind of stuff. If it’s alcoholism, it’s the same thing, it’s become less of a stigma. I’m not saying it always has been, because it used to be, er...it used to be really frowned upon. But now, if you’re an alcoholic, you’re protected by all sorts of rules in the work place, and you get help. Over-eaters are just... looked at, as comedy, you know just, just, just greedy, and lazy...and it’s not the case.

LOOK AT THE FUNNY FAT PERSON...

There are a lot of kids who just go into themselves, and they get worse, worse, worse. And, then, depression. That depression will cause more eating... and it’s just a chain of events that, that leads to, you know, a desperate situation. And the media doesn’t help...you’ve got the Daily Record who talks about ‘lard buckets’. Charge the ‘lard buckets’ double to get on the bus, put them on a diet – and all this kind of stuff. And then, when you watch anytime there’s a thing on TV about people who are overweight, it’s never done from the point of view of ‘why has this happened?’ No, it’s always done from a point of view of: ‘run, you know, and lets see them in their pants getting weighed’... and they play tuba music, you know, whenever a fat person walks on TV they play tuba music [he sings tuba music]: pom pi pom, pom pi pom, pom pi pom] [laughter]. And they’ve always got a comedy voiceover...Nobody’s ever done a TV show about obesity where they go...‘What’s happened?’ ‘Why has it happened? Why is it wrong?’ They just go, oh look at the funny fat person.

IT’S UP TO YOU TO FIND A SOLUTION…

When you've got wee small kids it’s up to you to find a solution to that. You cannae’ fall back on anybody. And the worst part of it is the shame. You cannae’ go to people and say ‘I have literally not got any money for food. You know? It’s so embarrassing and you feel like you've failed as well. So in between, perhaps payments of income support or you know just when a birthday crops up or something like that, you can hit the skids so badly
that you literally cannot afford to eat.
My solution would have been to visit people (laughs). So I would've visited my parents and things and that's how you would’ve got fed. If you stayed a bit too late, they would have invited you to stay overnight. You start doing skulduggery as a means of getting grub or you know, whatever, even gas. You know, there's been times when I've not had enough money to put in the meter in the past, in the wee card, erm, when the kids were wee, erm, and I have had that experience. It's dead, dead draining and, erm…. you just feel really ashamed and as if you're letting your kids down.
The fact of the matter is they're oblivious. They don't actually know because you do rescue them fae it. But there's a personal price to pay, erm… you know, for yourself, for your emotions, erm… and even your dignity. You just feel really ashamed of yourself; you’ve failed. So, yeah, I have experienced that and I even thought about stealing a bag of potatoes once. That was gonnae be my solution. I was thinking, how am I gonnae get a meal? Tatties and butter… hmmm… I've got the butter; I need some tatties but literally not a penny.
Now I can rake, you know, rake about the house tonight and I can find my bus fair. But when you've reached, and you do reach, a point where the couch is exhausted - there's nothing else down the couch (laughs), there's nothing else in the wee box, there's nothing in your purse - and you're just going, ‘oohh, I've not got money’ and that might last for two days till you're benefits come. In the meantime you might've borrowed money, borrowed food, but then the domino effect is you have to pay that back. Then the one day of being skint turns into two days, because of that domino effect. Erm, I'm glad that is behind me and I hope it never comes to get me again. My daughters are big and a wee bit more financially independent but, erm, aye, er, it’s very, very, very bad for your health, in many, many ways.

ONE PLANET EATING...

t’s all to do with this one planet eating thing, because at the moment it’s going to take about 2.9 planets to feed everybody and we’re trying to make people change their eating habits so as that it only takes one planet to feed everybody.

A TABLE IS VERY CRITICAL…

I’ve always believed that a table is very critical. If everybody sits down round a table you then think about what you put on it. And if you think about what you put on it, then you look at what you are eating and you talk about what you are eating. And, suddenly, just unwrapping a plastic sandwich doesn't have quite the same relevance as having a nice freshly baked loaf of bread and some decent cheese. Erm, and I strongly believe that people if they gather round a table (you know, across the generations) and people really strongly have a connection with the food then they have a connection with the community.

PEOPLE JUST AREN’T COOKING...

We did cookery at school. We got Home Economics, which I think is really critical.
I mean, a cousin of mine is a Head of Home Economics up in Inverness and she… she just despairs… She says they usually have to supply them all in the schools now because you can’t say to somebody: ‘Bring in flour.’ ‘Bring in sugar’. Because they just say: ‘we don’t have that’, ‘we haven’t got that.’ So, you know, you’re several generations down and people just aren’t cooking.

CLOOTIE DUMPLINGS…

You know I was just thinking of my gran… She was a big lady until she got old. And she fed everybody, you know? We used to joke about it, you know…? That’s my dad’s side of the family. And, er, she lived to be a hundred. She was amazing. She used to make clootie dumplings for people and leave them on your car seat for your birthday. And you would come back and find this clootie dumpling. She, she was just awesome but, but… and… she was just enveloping. Sorry I’m getting emotional now..

BUT THERE IS RESISTANCE…

I’ve been following the actions of this group of women who had heard that Tesco was building a new, er, a new supermarket and were going to demolish the local community centre to get access for the new supermarket. I mean, we went there, and it’s where people go dancing and they have bingo and they have keep fit clubs… all the kind of stuff. It’s a really lively and active place and the only place in this otherwise devastated area.
And then they discovered and so these women, local women, who were told that this was inevitable and the planning committee had decided and that was that, they went along to the planning committee and said, ‘well, hang on a minute, er, what’s going on here?’ They dismissed them all, because they were a group of women and they said well you can’t do anything about it because of planning, blah, blah, blah. Until one of the women said ‘well, actually, if you look at paragraph thirty-four subsection G, you can’t do this and they stopped and went… oh fuck… because it was about consultation.
We went to the centre of their town.
I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve been there, but you know it’s an archetypal dormitory town. You know, erm, a centre with flats and then a row of shops in the middle, in what is essentially, er, er, an assembly of blocks of flats in the centre of a street… there used to be local shops and then they all closed down in a matter of five years. They went to find out why and it turned out that the rent started going up and when people couldn’t afford to pay the rent, it was then bought by a mysterious property company, and one-by-one each shop closed down and then it turned out that the property company was owned by Tesco. Anyway, we went to look at it…
It's a devastated graffiti-covered empty shopping centre where nobody dares to walk anymore and that is a kind of living monument to what they’ve done. They’ve just destroyed. Except for this group of women, who have said ‘well actually, there’s fuck all left if we don’t fight back’. Anyway, the supermarket they said ‘don’t worry’, they said ‘you can have a sports centre’. ‘And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll have a sports centre and that’ll be private will it?’. ‘Yes, but you know local people will get reductions and they’ll be a café there so all the old people can go in there.’ So you can imagine, right, all the local elderly people will go to a sports centre surrounded by machines and loud rock music and people in Lycra and buy their cappuccino. Will they hell! In the end, the people in of that town are unlikely to be able to afford to use the Tesco at all, and so actually it’s destined to become a commuter centre for people on the Southside of Glasgow.
But there is resistance.

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films about food

1/12

THE SPICE OF LIFE

BY THE KIRTI GROUP AT SHANTI BHAVAN

Did things used to be better or do we look at the past with rose-tinted glasses? The Kirti Group draw on their personal experiences to explore how food culture around them has changed over their lifetimes, and the effect these changes have had on their relationship with food.

This film was made with the Glasgow creative team, Vickie Beesley, Kim Beveridge & Kim Moore.

A group of ten children have been out foraging. Bramble crumble, roasted acorns are all cooked on the fire pit which they built, with a tasty nettle on the side! They’ve been talking about dislikes and likes and why they think being closely connected to the food they eat might be important.

This film was made with the Dumfries and Galloway creative team, Anne Errington, Drew Johnstone & John Dinning.

This film focuses on the distance that is often between us and the food we eat. Food and food production is a major part of the local economy, in a place where butchers still have their own livestock and fishmongers buy direct from the boats and the local markets. The film looks particularly at the contrasts between pre-packed food and the fresh locally sourced products available in local small businesses, and asks the question, how good is your food?

This film was made with the Aberdeenshire creative team, Chris Lee, Graeme Roger & Dave Martin.

We are a big team, a busy team, a team who take time for each other and the work we do. We work hard, and enjoy the bread we make, organic and artisan. We all have our own jobs to do, and the heart of our bakery beats with an anarchic rhythm. Laughter rings out as we bake. Real food made by real people, we challenge you to find better bread, better bakers, or better banter!

This film was made with the Edinburgh ICEAH team, Caro Donald, Ruth Barrie & Gareth Griffiths.

It is the future. Blackouts are becoming increasingly frequent, sometimes planned, sometimes not. How does this impact what we can eat? Dumfries High students jump into an imagined future to try and better understand their own relationship to food and where it comes from.

This film was made with the Dumfries and Galloway ICEAH team, Anne Errington, Drew Johnstone & John Dinning.

Alone Together explores the social aspects of sharing food and good company. This is sharply juxtaposed against the isolation often experienced by older people who are living alone following the loss of a partner and the way that that isolation changes the experience and function of eating. Alone Together is a celebration of new friendships between older people as they come together, to be alone together.

This film was made with the Aberdeenshire creative team, Chris Lee, Graeme Roger & Dave Martin.

We are all individuals, we are a community... From all around the world, the paths that led us here to this farm are different. What brought you here? Where have you been? What can you remember? Did you know we have over 10,000 taste buds, and as many individual memories given to us buy our experiences of food. Our memories and stories are our own and unique... Come, and share with us.... then ask yourself: Where does food take you...?

This film was made with the Edinburgh creative team, Caro Donald, Ruth Barrie & Gareth Griffiths.

BY THE TRANSITIONS TO LEARNING AND WORK GROUP AT JOHN WHEATLEY COLLEGE

Eat healthy... Eat cheap... Eat alone... Eat easy... Eat pricey... Eat home cooked... EAT NOW! A group of teenagers reflect on the mixed messages they hear about food. Is food really the most important thing? Why bother eating healthily? What’s all the fuss about food, anyway?!

This film was made with the Glasgow creative team, Vickie Beesley, Kim Beveridge & Kim Moore.

This group of older people have been reminiscing about how they got food in the past...local shops, farms or the house pig. It is more difficult now: local shops have gone; some cannot drive any more; some have lost the taste for food...But if there is only one of you left, why bother?

This film was made with the Dumfries and Galloway creative team, Anne Errington, Drew Johnstone & John Dinning.

A contemplation on whether our children know enough about the food they eat. This young group ponder what they know about food – where does it come from, how is it made, and what does it take to be a food hero?

This film was made with the Glasgow creative team, Vickie Beesley, Kim Beveridge & Kim Moore.

This is a film about Moray Foodbank and Moray Food Network. These are organisations providing free food boxes and cost price fruit and vegetables to people in need across Moray. The film is focuses why the foodbank is in such demand at the moment on the young people (16 - 24) who have become end users of the Foodbank service whilst going through a transitional living scheme in Moray.

This film was made with the Aberdeenshire creative team, Chris Lee, Graeme Roger & Dave Martin.

Making and breaking bread together is about so much more than just a filling and familiar meal. The Sourdough Exchange brings together people working in different communities, to share and exchange inspirations, and some perspiration. As the team thresh, harvest, gather, mill, and bake Scottish Rye, this film asks: Why does bread matter?

This film was made with the Edinburgh creative team, Caro Donald, Ruth Barrie & Gareth Griffiths.

At each event we screened the films made locally and asked the audience to share with us their own stories and experiences.

Throughout the night audiences told about us their favourite food memories, the food producers & retailers they were inspired by, what would be on their ideal shopping list and engaged in imagining what Scotland’s food culture might be like.

Details of any future I Could Eat A Horse screenings and events will be posted here.

If you are interested in screening any of the films, or have any forthcoming events you would like us to be involved in please contact info@amomentspeace.co.uk

events

A MOMENT’S PEACE is in the process of developing an Education Workbook to accompany the films which can be used by schools, colleges and community groups to inspire their own creative responses to the topics we’ve explored throughout I COULD EAT A HORSE. Further details of these resources will be updated soon.

I COULD EAT A HORSE is the second in a triptych of food-focused projects led by A Moment’s Peace. In 2012 we created a local performance and cooking project PLAYING WITH FOOD, in Cranhill, Glasgow. We are currently in the process of developing the third installment of the triptych. EAT ME is touring show for primary schools exploring our desire to eat more and more and more.

learning

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A Moment's Peace became a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) in May 2013. Our Charity Number is SC044000.